THE NEW YOR.KER. superior to it? The art world is highly invested in the idea that you can take an object and set it in a room, and the interrelationships will be so strong and so meaningful that all the kinds of change that take place in the object as a result of its being in a new environ- ment will not critically affect the ob- ject. If that is the given assumption, then the object can be moved from one environment to another without being critically altered, which then gives rise to the illusion that it can be moved from culture to culture, that it has the ability to transcend its cultural speci- ficity, which in turn gives rise to the ultimate illusion: that the object can transcend time. Because what is being claimed is that there exist certain ob- jects isolated and meaningful enough to be transcendent, that they have the power to go on and on-that they are, as it were, timeless. Well, one of the things that I was becoming involved with at that point in playing artist was the growing suspicion that this break- ing down of the edge, the idea of the painting's moving into its environ- ment-and there were many of us who were exploring that terrain-that this was putting the whole heightened ra- tionale of the art object in doubt. There is simply no real separation line -only an intellectual one-between the object and its time-environment. They are completely interlocking: nothing can exist in the world inde- pendent of all the other things in the world. To me, the whole history of contemporary art starts out as a highly informed and highly sophisticated pic- torial activity. But by the time I ar- rived on the scene, as a post-Abstract Expressionist, there was at least the possibility of looking at the world as a kind of continuum rather than as a collection of broken-up and isolated events. " This idea dominated Irwin's activ- ity between 1968 and 1970. It was an implicit presence when, in early Octo- ber of 1970, Irwin opened his Venice studio space for a showing of his "Sky lig h t-Col umn" installation, one of his acrylic-column experiments. And then, later that month, it rose to the fore when Irwin travelled across the country to the Museum of Modern Art) where he made the first of two gestures that, taken together, would constitute the decisive break of his mid -career In 1970, most of the curators at the Museum of Modern Art were in- volved in researching and compiling large-scale historical retrospectives, 87 Check Into Another CentuI)T. # ,.. ......,. .. .\ , '. ' . \ t' \ It\ .... TheBiltmore r!!J The only 4-Starhotelzn down own Los Angeles Call (213) 624-1011 znLosAnge es Elsewhere "nCalfomia call (800) 252 0175 RestofCont nental USA call (800) 421-0156 MADEIRA. MOUNTAINOUS, MYSTERIOUS, MESMERIZING. Our Island of Paradise. Where you can stroll past hibiscus, hike through verdant mountains, and discover villages famed for homemade embroidery. All at prices that seem as if they came from a storybook, too. For more about Madeira, mail in the coupon. "'" It. <"\<; - .",j: . þ '-"'" .*= ;t: \ RTU A VACATION WEt SPENT Name_ Address_ ___ City _State Zip Portuguese National Tourist Office. 548 Fifth Ave New York NY 10036 Offices also In Lo::, Angeles and Chicago NY3 8